Diary of a Failed Game Designer

With the best of intentions…Homebrew, table top, R.P.G super soup. This is going to be kind of a disjointed post, I apologize ahead of time. With the best of intentions I have tried to put up Monday, Wednesday, Friday posts without too much filler. With work and the holidays, my unfortunate nba2k14 addiction, and actual gaming this past week I found myself lacking proper inspiration for today post. Let’s get to the Homebrew goodness. You ever think that game design is addicting? When I get something that’s really clicking I can work on it for hours and hours and the time just flies. The only other time I ever get like that is when I used to draw and paint regularly. It’s a similar endorphin rush. The other side of that same token however, is if things are not clicking I get grumpy and drop into a depressed mood.   (Not depression really, just a shitty mental state, depression is serious business and I don’t want to make light of it.) So it is with that in mind that I find myself in a c

So why can’t my  Dwarf Ride a Bear again? Great question: Some of my most obvious answers: Because you're level 1 Because you don't have the animal empathy or animal handling, or anything like that. Because you don't have ride animal (Bear) Because bear would eat you. Your Druid buddy over there, the one giving you stink eye, would kill you in your sleep and release the bear. Because our campaign is set in the Darksun setting and there are no bears. why do I ask, here we go... I am working on stream lining the character creation and just the basic, “lets get started playing”  parts of my shards of Thimbral game. I start thinking about the flexibility of narrative games vs the stricter more traditional forms of Role playing games. I don’t want to project flexibility as better than traditional games. In fact I feel  having a very open character creation in an RPG necessitates all kinds of other processes that a more traditional game builds in. Here is what I mean: If you take

Hey! I'm going to post actual Physical shards of Thimbral Progress today ! Not just vapor theory mumbo jumbo like my usual.  This will be A quick view of a prototype starting character sheet or even character worksheet if you like, for the Shards of Thimbral R.P.G.   This sheet or one like it will be on the last page of the PDF when shards of Thimbral is complete. It will not meant to be the "forever" record of a player's character and the character's adventures. What I'm hoping for is this sheet functioning  more like a work sheet to help move character creation along. What I'm posting here is simply baby steps, nothing fancy, more of an attempted proof of concept. it's a start I know it is a bit hard to see on the blog, but it's a full sized 8 1/2" by 11" sheet containing not only spots to jot down initial character info but also the definitions of some of the  character terms and their uses in game. I think a tool like this would be v

This is part two and the conclusion of the Christmas dungeon crawl run by my friend Jay for our AD&D 2 nd ed group. The players already had characters from the game I am running , so this is kind of a side quest run for holiday fun. For my part, I am normally the gm so I did not have a character handy. I created a character known as Brandr the Barbarian just for this game. Even if he lives through the search for Krampus his future is uncertain. If anyone wants to see “I am Brandr” part 1 it's here I Am Brandr Part 1 Caves of Krampus   The real legend of Krampus can be found here : http://www.krampus.com/ and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus Enjoy the crawl. I am Brandr part 2: We find our selves continuing deeper into the cave of Krampus. He has stolen children for a local city, my companions and I have sworn to rescue them and defeat this creature before any harm can come. We have insofar fought Goblins, Giant spiders and two thuggish orcs. I have been thankful to

Welcome! This is a retelling of the AD&D2ed game my friend Jay ran on Roll20 Wednesday night. My character is a 3 rd level Barbarian named Brandr. This is his version of the events , others might differ, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. I don't get to play all that often so I try to take notes when I do, this is the result. Others: Guthar Wulfhar a Preist of Thodin The Master, A druid Cyrus Magnus a thief? Were still not sure, he is cagey. Johann Tyree, Assistant Professor from Achoo University and Gnomish Lecturer I am Brandr part 1: I am Brandr. I have come south from my tribe because in a dream I heard the call of the Druids. Dream Magic is powerful and it is all I needed to leave my home. I am near the city of Krom, this is far form my mountain home, I will miss the bear hunt this  year, but this I must do. I have arrived here near a cave with a group of travelers, one it was said is a Druid perhaps even the last druid, so he must be the one I seek. I joi

So it snows in winter..whodathunkit? Shoveling is not my thing, it's going to be a snow blower Christmas this year I sear it. My driveway dealt me a crushing defeat with our first storm this year and although I rallied and won the field of battle the night of our second storm, my back is feeling it.  Onto the  good stuff... Looking at the old with new eyes:     One of my friends is going to run an AD&D second edition game, via Roll 20 and I am going to jump in and play. It's cool because I have not been on the player side of an AD&D game in quite some time (years). I have to make an AD&D second edition character and level it up a few times (3 or 4 Gm's call) so that he can run with the rest of the party. I have chosen to make a straight ahead fighter. I am not going to make any thing more or less complicated than that mostly because the guy who is GM-ing normally plays the fighter, so the party will be down that role for the night.  Looking at AD&D 2nd

Shards of Thimbral, Laying out. Making some decisions. I have decided on the basic lay out for the shards of Thimbral game. I plan on opening the game with “Ten steps to playing this game NOW” which will pair the game down to the bare bones, and get players playing as quickly as possible. (cause Players gotta play.) After that section I will expand each part of the 10 ten steps in it's own chapter. Lastly there will be a fluff section expanding the setting framework that I posted earlier. My goal is to have people actually playing as quickly as I can. It sounds simple, but it's really not. considering one of the pillars of the game is the set up stage where characters are created and the foundations for the characters locations and relationships are set up, takes time. In our second play test the charter creation and set up phase took roughly two and a half hours. That was with some joking around and general B.S. But still it was a chunk of time. I want to at least half the tim

I figured because It is snowing and crappy here in the Hudson Valley I would do a kind of weekend extra post. This is not going to be a super thought provoking affair but more a list of what I am keeping track of right now. Sort of for the selfish reason of having all the links in one place for my own uses. And also if you are sitting at home trying to decide if you want to go outside and shovel or would rather read some cool stuff..Read the cool stuff Here we go in no particular order. http://geniuslocigames.blogspot.com Posted about floating islands today and landed directly in the same camp as I am in when it comes to settings and moving away from overly dark settings. http://www.fatestorm.com Honestly I am not even quite sure what all this is yet, but it looks really interesting, evocative and cool, so I plan on spending some time this week reading as much of the Fatestorm website as I can. http://vengersatanis.blogspot.com Venger's Kick starter looks like it is going to be a

DEAD ZONE kick-starter unboxing Video BLOG (Drum roll please) Something special for everyone who follows the blog today. The unboxing of my DeadZone kick starter package from Mantic games. http://www.manticgames.com/ Some details: Last spring DeadZone went ape shit on kick starter raising $1,216,482 on a $50,000 dollar goal.. or ...2433% funded, that sir is “magic bananas funding” level http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/deadzone-the-sci-fi-miniatures-board-game?ref=live  . I was an early adopter of “Dread-Ball” and then vacillated over whether or not to back the DeadZone kick starter when it came around. Dread-Ball was super fun so I was sure Deadzone would be  as much fun. So why the vacillation abut deadzone? Good question. I knew they would make their goal, Mantic had just killed it with Dredball and had that kick starter momentum that any company would die for. Dead Zone was by the same designer + Jake Thornton (Whose Design Blogs I really enjoyed and were an influenc

PIG! (Possibly interesting game) I don’t wanna be a pig! I want to be an I.G. an interesting game. What I mean is this, there are A LOT of games out there right now. I don’t know how you see it, but in my view this is like the damn golden age of table top games. There are more quality R.P.G.s and board games being developed and on the market than I have ever seen and I have been around this hobby for about 25 years or so. It’s fantastic, almost heady sometimes. The quality is crossed the board better than ever and the creativity is simply off the charts. If you disagree, go to your local game store pick up a copy of the Numenera hardcover and just hold it, leaf through, then do the same with a hard copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics look how much personality just oozes from its pages, then Fate Core and look at how well put together and organized that is, how frankly beautiful Numenera is. Then think there are HUNDREDS of other examples I could be using. ON top of that I have not even ment

On the topic of mature topics/ Setting design decisions. I read an article recently about sexism as it exists in the steam punk genre, Written by Eric Simon and found here http://steamscapes.com/node/62 (It's a set of two excellent articles that I think any fan of the steam punk genre should take the time to read.) and another quick post wherein someone wanted address people who were complaining about the artwork in his game, which was apparently kind of racy (I never saw any of it). Far be it for me to judge, I don’t know from corsets. But they are thought provoking reads, and definitely inspire some discussion.   So this brings me to the topic at hand, the treatment of social issues in role playing games   whether in a   real world sense (for example treatment of alternative lifestyles or modern economic issues in the game text) or as genre specific. (For example the over objectification of women in parts of the steam punk genre, or the chainmail bikini syndrome that has been ar

The internet and the designer. I'm moving forward with my Shards of Thimbral project, most of which has been snoringly detailed in this blog. As I work however, a specter, an amorphous cloud of cold..cold darkness tracks my every move.. Ok really it's just the internet, not some kind of pan-dimensional soul eating vapor, but still it's kind of creepy. To be even more exact not the internet as such it's on line play, (ala G+ hangouts and Roll20 ect.) I have touched on this subject before, but not in any real depth, so I thought I would revisit. My issue is this as I read,, type , and playtest Shards of Thimbral, I have relized more and more that ther eis no easy way to run the resolution mechanics online. Now I say “easy way?” because I know there is someone out there on the web who is more creative and smarter than I am who will be able to hack around in Roll20's Ap shell and come up with a solution. I have no doubt of that. I would like the general user with